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October 23, 2012

Sneaky, Lying Cephalopod

Take a good long look at these Australian mourning
cuttlefish. They’re courting – you can tell because one of them (the male) is
sporting a set of flashy black and white stripes on his skin. At least, he’s
striped on the side the female’s looking at. The pattern on his other side is
quite different. In fact, on that side he looks like a she. That’s because
there’s another male lurking out of the frame in that direction. To that
distant male, this scene doesn’t look like a tryst – it looks like a pair of
girls hanging out.

This trick, according to a recent paper in Biology
Letters, may let our courting male get intimate
with a mate without attracting unwanted (and violent) attention from the other
male. But what I found most interesting about the paper was the observation
that males only try this sort of deception in very specific circumstances –
when a male finds himself in a group containing only one other male and one
other female. He won’t send mixed messages if two females are nearby, or if
he’s part of a larger group. Which suggests three things about the minds of
these cuttlefish:

1. They can count, at least up to four.

2. They can imagine what the world looks like to another
cuttlefish. (Not to go all theory of mind-y, but that's pretty impressive for an invertebrate.)

3. They can figure out when they’re most likely to get away
with a lie.

And when it’s a lie that gets a male some undisturbed “us
time” with a receptive female, it's a lie that's worth the risk of telling.